In today's information age, data storage systems often are configured to manage file systems that include huge amounts of storage space. It is common for file systems to include many terabytes of storage space spread over multiple storage devices. In such file system managing data storage systems, clients/host computers issue request packets relating to one or more access requests to objects (such as e.g. files and/or directories) of the managed file system according to one or more network protocols, some protocols including mechanisms for including credit requests for requesting credits to allow for further access requests within a current established connection. Handling access requests of such protocols needs to handle such credit requests and return appropriate credit responses.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and an apparatus, and related computer-program products, for managing access request to one or more file systems by efficiently handling the processing of request packets, with the aim of increasing the IOPS performance, and efficiently and reliably including credit request processing mechanisms and credit response generation in accordance with network protocols.